Chronicle

With an epidemic in the making, Russian scientists come to Yale for training in HIV prevention.

For decades the Iron Curtain limited personal freedoms within the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, as well as social exchanges between East and West. Until it fell in the early 1990s, it also kept at bay the HIV/AIDS epidemic sweeping Western Europe. The number of new HIV infections in Russia hovered at only 200 a year. By 1996, however, largely due to injection-drug use, the number of cases rose to 1,546. Last year 18,140 new cases were reported in Russia, where health authorities expect that total HIV infections will reach a million by the year 2002.

“Russia
is
confronting
what
is
a
very
early,
but
likely
to
be
very
massive
HIV
epidemic,”
said
Robert
W.
Ryder,
M.D.,
John
Rodman
Paul
Professor
of
Epidemiology
and
Medicine.
He
is
also
director
of
Training
and
Research
in
HIV
Prevention
in
Russia,
a
training
project
for
Russian
physicians
and
scientists.
Ryder
and
his
Russian
colleagues...

After
a
lifetime
of
tending
first
to
children,
then
to
young
adults,
Alan
C.
Mermann,
M.D.,
M.Div.,
is
about
to
embark
on
a
third
career,
ministering
to
the
elderly
and
the
sick.
Mermann,
76,
retired
in
June
as
the
medical
school’s
second
chaplain,
a
post
he
assumed
“temporarily”
17
years
ago.With
its
pots
of
coffee
and
stacks
of
newspapers,
magazines
and
crossword
puzzles,
Mermann’s
basement
office
has
offered...